The following is adapted from Mere Economics: Lessons For and From the Ordinary Business of Life by Dr. Art Carden and Dr. Caleb Fuller. Used with permission of B&H Academic. Learn more and order here.
Don’t Listen to Thanos
“The universe is finite, its resources, finite. If life is left unchecked, life will cease to exist.” That’s how Thanos, the “Mad Titan” and villain of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019) describes his “simple calculus” to his daughter Gamora. After scouring the universe for Infinity Stones, Thanos secures them to his gauntlet, snaps his fingers, erases half the life in the universe, and saves life itself from itself—or so he thinks.
His idea is hardly original. Fears that overpopulation will doom us stretch back at least to Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb is the most spectacular modern statement. The primatologist Jane Goodall shares the view and says she “would encourage every single conservation organisation, every single government organisation to consider the absurdity of unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources.” There is even a Subreddit called “thanosdidnothingwrong.”
At the same time, the Bible’s first command to Adam and Eve is “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” The Septuagint is stronger. It renders Gen 1:28 as “fill completely so that nothing is left over.” Who is right? The omnipotent Creator of the universe or Thanos and Jane Goodall?
The population pessimists are grievously, tragically mistaken. Life does not need to be “checked” by anyone—not Thanos, not Paul Ehrlich, not Jane Goodall, not anyone. In this chapter’s conclusion, we tackle two common questions about economic progress. But . . . won’t all those additional people destroy God’s good creation? Not if the rules are right. But . . . doesn’t the earth have a “carrying capacity”? There might be, but at 8 billion people and counting, we’re still nowhere close. Be optimistic: people have one mouth but two hands, two eyes, two ears, and importantly two hemispheres that make up an enormous brain equipped for problem-solving, innovation, and new ideas.
To pessimists like Goodall, resource depletion is unavoidable. It’s simple arithmetic: if you divide resources by population, then a higher population must mean fewer resources per person. But we don’t think the math adds up, for two reasons. First, sunlight bathes us in over 430 quintillion joules of energy every hour. Scientists estimate that people have expended about 22 zetajoules of energy since 1950. That means that the sun drenches the earth in as much energy as we have expended since 1950 every fifty-two hours. To those who claim infinite growth is impossible in a closed system, blinding sunlight should convince you it’s not a closed system.
Second, population pessimism fails again and again because it underestimates what economist Julian Simon called the ultimate resource: creativity. An old proverb says, “necessity is the mother of invention.” We say basically the same thing with essential 4: “incentives affect people’s choices.” When something gets more expensive, people look for substitutes. Pricier gas means people carpool, walk, combine trips (stopping at the store on the way home from the gym, for example), or work from home. In the long run, they move closer to work and buy smaller cars that get better gas mileage. In the very long run, they harness new power sources. We’re still waiting for our “Mr. Fusion” from the Back to the Future movies, but breakthroughs in nuclear fusion technology over the last decade make us hopeful, and with the world’s best minds working on the problem, we hope to see scalable solar power within our lifetimes.
Prophecies about “the end of oil” never come true because, as Thomas Sowell points out, people seek and find oil when it’s profitable to do so; hence, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve are unnecessary. We are drowning the four horsemen of the apocalypse—death, famine, war, and pestilence—in cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy, and we can hasten their demise with further energy innovation.
The “finite resources” argument also begs the question because it assumes we know which materials are “resources” and which are not. Something is only a resource insofar as we can use it to satisfy wants, and we figure this out through long processes of trial and error. Oil was just land-ruining sludge until we figured out how to use it. Here’s economist Michael Munger’s useful test: if people will pay you for it, it’s a resource. If you have to pay someone to take it, it’s garbage. Without private property rights and exchange-promoting rules, we can’t know which is which. What’s more, we get pollution.
